Integrated circuits or chips are used in most products that have electronic components. A typical integrated circuit (IC) design is initially conceived and tested schematically by a circuit designer, with a number of components and devices connected to generate a circuit with desired performance and characteristics. Once the circuit has been designed, it must be reconfigured from the schematic format into a geometric layout format specifying a suitable semiconductor implementation of the circuit.
A large number of components in the IC may be facilitated with an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool that allows the circuit designer to position and connect various shapes on the IC. The circuit designer create a custom design of such ICs, printed-circuit boards, and other electronic circuits containing the physical locations and dimensions of the circuit's components, interconnections, and various layers from the original design that may then be fabricated using EDA technologies that typically run on an operating system in conjunction with a processor-based computer system.
A geometric layout of the IC design schematic and database of records are generated to visually and logically specify the components included in the semiconductor device layout for the IC design. The configuring of the electronic circuit to a geometric layout is typically a very complicated task, and is governed by a large number of geometric rules. The geometric layout of the semiconductor device may contain geometric features such as polygons to indicate the proper size, shape, location and separation of a certain physical feature of the electronic circuit, distinguishing it from other physical features, or to indicate proper isolation and separation among the circuit elements. The geometric layout of a typical semiconductor device contains multiple figures and layers, and one or more figures are grouped to form a figure group.
Currently, the process of generating the figures describing the features of electronic components for the design of the IC separately and manually is a tedious task and is prone to error; particularly where multiple devices of an IC are grouped together into a single, high-level device to be manipulated by the designer as a single grouping or structural component of the IC. What is needed are systems and methods of circuit design that facilitate automatic generation of figures on a graphical user interface (GUI) and the underlying data describing the features of electronic components for the design of the IC, such that several components of the IC design may be logically grouped and manipulated through, both, the GUI design interface and the database storing the data associated with each of the components displayed on the GUI design interface.